planet sized processors (Re: On what the NSA does with its tech)

[Adam Back]

The planet sized processor stuff reminds me of Charlie Stross' sci-fi
short story "Scratch Monkey" which features nanotech, planet sized
processors which colonize space and build more planet-sized
processors.  The application is upload, real-time memory backup, and
afterlife in DreamTime (distributed simulation environment), and an
option of reincarnation.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/fiction/monkey/

Adam

On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 04:44:58PM -0400, Jack Lloyd wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 11:04:15AM -0700, "Hal Finney" wrote:
> 
> [...] 
> > The system will consume 10^25 * 60 nanowatts or about 6 * 10^17 watts.
> > Now, that's a lot.  It's four times what the earth receives from the sun.
> > So we have to build a disk four times the area (not volume) of the earth,
> > collect that power and funnel it to our computers.  Probably we would
> > scatter the computers throughout the disk, which would be mostly composed
> > of solar collectors.  (Keeping the disk gravitationally stable is left
> > as an exercise for the student, as is the tradeoff involved in making
> > it smaller but moving it closer to the sun.)
> 
> If I did my unit conversions right, such a disk would be over 30,000 miles in
> diameter. So we'll probably get some advance notice - "Hey, what's that big-ass
> thing orbiting around the Moon?"
> 
> -Jack